Numerous corruption schemes have emerged around the state-owned enterprise “Ukrspirt” to divert the monopolist’s products, from which “forty-degree” products are then produced at facilities controlled by the country’s top officials. At the same time, they are trying to “take over” the industry into the hands of the right people, launching the privatization process. The former head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Igor Shvaika, added fuel to the fire. In a recent interview with journalists, he mentioned the names of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and the head of the State Fiscal Service Igor Bilous as the persons actually protecting the production of illegal vodka in the country. At the same time, the newly appointed chief guardian of law and order of the country, Viktor Shokin, is in no hurry to respond to the statements of the once high-ranking official, who on duty knew all the “alcoholic” vicissitudes of the country. And all because the head of the GPU himself is involved in the “alcohol issue through his fugitive godson and, concurrently, the “vodka king” Alexei Chebotarev.
New ones arrived and decided to “milk”
A large-scale redistribution of property has begun at the Ukrspirt enterprise, associated with the desire of the country’s top leadership to “crush” truly the goose that lays the golden eggs. We started with a change in the leadership of the state monopolist.
So, just the other day, according to the order of the new head of the Ministry of Agrarian Food, Alexei Pavlenko, the head of Ukrspirt, Mikhail Labutin, was dismissed from his position. To manage the company in the status of “acting” for now. entrusted to Roman Ivanyuk, who had previously worked here as director of the financial department. Ivanyuk is called Poroshenko’s man, linking him with the head of the Presidential Administration Boris Lozhkin. Allegedly, as the head of the investment banking department of the Concord Capital company, Ivanyuk bought the Dobrobut chain of clinics for Lozhkin. At the last parliamentary elections, Ivanyuk ran for people’s deputy from the pro-presidential party “Petro Poroshenko Bloc” in one of the majority constituencies of the Volyn region, but took only third place.
If you take a closer look at the personnel changes, then, according to sources close to the management of Ukrspirt, the actual reason for all these changes is the return to the state-owned enterprise of the so-called overseers who controlled the industry during the previous pro-government regime of Yanukovych. This statement is proven by the fact that starting this year, in the office of the head of Ukrspirt, the entire process is actually led by a certain Andrey Akimenko, who is called the man of Alexey Chebotarev, a businessman who owns a number of large distilleries in the country. We’ll talk about it further.
The arrival of new management at Ukrspirt also marked the fact that today those “in charge”, with the help of the courts, are trying to take away a number of distilleries from the state monopolist. And this fact speaks of the complete “cohesion” of those who are trying to “squeeze” state property from those in power.
This is evidenced by the fact that the new government for the first time seriously decided to “milk” the country’s alcohol industry on the eve of the recent parliamentary elections. Then, traveling around the cities and villages of Ukraine, on the eve of the elections, Arseniy Yatsenyuk gathered representatives of large agricultural businesses in the Cherkasy region. The official occasion was the presentation of the election program of the Popular Front party headed by the prime minister.
However, after a meeting with businessmen, the head of the State Fiscal Service, Igor Bilous, together with his deputy Vladimir Khomenko, invited the head of Ukrspirt, Mikhail Labutin, to “donate money” for the election campaign of the “front-line soldiers.” Labutin, after a conversation with the country’s chief tax officer, who was actually engaged in racketeering in the spirit of the 90s, reported this to Schweike.
The choice of “Ukrspirt” as one of the main “money bags” for the political race by the team of the current prime minister was absolutely no coincidence. After all, at that time the company had a significant increase in profits due to the elimination of a number of corruption schemes. In particular, this concerned “turning off the tap” on the export of “leftist” alcohol to Moldova, which was “sat” by the current deputy head of the Popular Front faction, Andrei Ivanchuk, together with Yuri Ivanyushchenko, better known in certain circles as Yura Enakievsky.
After the incident in Cherkassy, Ivanchuk began to actively promote the topic of privatization of Ukrspirt, so that the state-owned enterprise would be in the hands of the “right” people. At the same time, Yatsenyuk’s team wants to sell the state-owned enterprise, according to Labutin, for symbolic money – 100-150 million UAH. Although, if you invest money in the reconstruction of Ukrspirt’s fixed assets, in the near future the enterprise would cost at least $5 billion.
The fact that behind the privatization process is a banal thirst for profit is confirmed by the events that unfolded in the Verkhovna Rada in the middle of last month. Then the parliament, by its decision, returned bill No. 1567 “On the list of objects of state property rights that are not subject to privatization” to the government for revision. The reason was the ill-fated Ukrspirt.
The whole point is that people from the President’s entourage obviously wanted to place their people on the “alcohol rivers” of the state. This fact was the reason for the nervous attacks of Andrei Ivanchuk, who accused his coalition colleagues from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, who voted to “slow down” the bill, of corruption. He was “supported” by the head of government, Yatsenyuk, who threatened that the government would announce all the names of corrupt officials, “regardless of their faces.”
However, a number of criminal cases have now been opened against the intractable head of Ukrspirt Labutin, who has held his post since 2010. In particular, regarding payment for raw materials that were not supplied to the company in the amount of about 300 million UAH. This fact led to the fact that today Mr. Labutin was put on the international wanted list by the Ministry of Internal Affairs through Interpol.
Meanwhile, the People’s Deputy and the Deputy Chief Fiscal are doing “left” under the auspices of Prime Minister Yatsenyuk
The above-mentioned Alexey Chebotarev, who was involved in the delivery of titushki to Kyiv just over a year ago, as well as the deputy head of the State Fiscal Service Vladimir Khomenko, influence everything that happens in Ukrspirt today. The interests of these people are closely intertwined, because Khomenko has a full cycle of production of alcoholic beverages in the Crimea annexed by Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), and Chebotarev supplies alcohol to these enterprises. According to Labutin, People’s Deputy from the Popular Front Ivanchuk also has his share in the “alcohol” pie, who controls a number of alcohol absolutization units located at the production facilities of the state-owned enterprise.
The scheme for diverting state alcohol into the shadows, developed with the participation of the people’s deputy and the country’s deputy chief tax officer, is indecently hackneyed. The fact is that from a number of factories in Western Ukraine, alcohol is transported to one place – the Khorostkovsky plant. Here, according to documents, it was supposed to be used to produce a supposedly special type of fuel – bioethanol.
In reality, after the transfer of alcohol is written off to the Techinservice company, controlled by Ivanchuk, the product, with a strength of ninety-six degrees, “goes” to the enterprises for the production of “leftist” vodka! Isn’t the reason why a group of “those in power” operate with impunity today lies in their “family ties” with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk? After all, Khomenko is married to the sister of the wife of the head of the Cabinet of Ministers, and Ivanchuk was once a classmate of Arseniy Petrovich.
To be fair, it should be said that these schemes were not invented yesterday and worked even when Labutin was in charge of Ukrspirt. And for sure, he had his own “gesheft” together with the current main “whistleblower” Igor Shvaika, who found himself out of work in Yatsenyuk’s Cabinet after the elections.
There is no doubt about this, if we remember at least how the Svoboda minister organized a scheme to squander land with the involvement of controlled deputies and officials in regional state administrations. Today, pushed away from the “gold mine”, and therefore offended by everyone and everything, Labutin and his former boss Shvaika are “leaking” all the corrupt combinations known to them in the industry.
Why, being at the helm of the agrarian department, Shvaika was never able to put a stop to the lawlessness in the alcohol sphere?
And here is our “family”: the “supervisor” Leshik, Shokin’s godson, is on the run, but runs the business
The revelations of former high officials also affect the figure of the newly appointed head of the GPU, Viktor Shokin. After all, one of the organizers of the criminal business, the aforementioned Alexey Chebotarev, is the godson of the current chief prosecutor of the country!
It is curious that during the Euromaidan period, then People’s Deputy from the Batkivshchyna faction Vitaliy Yarema named Chebotarev on the list of people who organized forceful provocations against participants in anti-government protests in November last year. At the same time, Yarema said that Chebotarev is a shady businessman who owns assets in the production of alcoholic beverages. Yarema also pointed out his closeness to the former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Vitaly Zakharchenko and the fact that this character was “repeatedly prosecuted.”
The words of the ex-Prosecutor General are confirmed by the fact that in the early 2000s, Chebotarev was part of the “brigade” of the capital’s crime boss nicknamed “Pimple”, who controlled Troyeshchina. Chebotarev himself among the “lads” had the nickname Leshik.
In addition to outright racketeering, Leshik also showed the makings of a businessman in his early years. He decided to direct the capital accumulated through extortion into one of the most profitable areas – the vodka trade. At first he sold and bought illegal “forty-degree” in the markets, then he mastered new horizons by entering Ukrspirt, using the “iron and soldering iron” method in relation to directors of distilleries. He himself rose to the status of vodka king.
Today, Chebotarev’s assets, in particular, include distilleries in the Chernihiv, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk and Poltava regions. All of them, as we have already said, supply alcohol to Crimea, to distilleries controlled by Khomenko.
True, now the reason for Chebotarev’s non-publicity is the fact that he is on the run, hiding from law enforcement officers who accuse him of deliberately killing a hostage. The relevant information is contained on the website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which states that Leshik has been wanted since July 16 last year.
The phenomenon when a wanted person has not only not yet been caught by law enforcement, but, despite everything, is involved in a large corruption scheme related to the trafficking of illegal alcohol, is partly confirmed by Labutin’s information about the fugitive’s family ties with the head of the GPU Shokin. To paraphrase a well-known phrase from the cult Soviet film “Gentlemen of Fortune,” one can speak on this matter: “Who will put him in prison, since his uncle is the Prosecutor General!”
At the same time, the ex-head of “Ukrspirt” rightly draws attention to the fact that with Shokin’s arrival at the GPU, who promised to investigate in detail all the facts of oppression of the Euromaidan protesters, the Prosecutor General, for some reason, suddenly does not remember the name of Chebotarev. But, as we have already said, it was on the tongue of Shokin’s former chief Vitaly Yarema.
In this regard, Procurator’s Truth has several questions for the leadership of the GPU and the government:
– will the new Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin study all the announced facts of the presence of corruption schemes in Ukrspirt and hold senior officials from the State Fiscal Service, the government and people’s deputies accountable?
– How will Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk explain the desire of the Cabinet of Ministers to quickly “give up” on the state enterprise “Ukrspirt”, putting it up for privatization as soon as possible in all conceivable and inconceivable ways? What is higher: the desire to patch up budget holes, or to transfer the state monopoly into the hands of “our” people?
– will the GPU study the actions of the ex-head of the Ministry of Agrarian Food Igor Shvaika, as the immediate leader of another “former” – the head of Ukrspirt Mikhail Labutin, against whom a number of criminal cases are currently instituted. Or will Labutin be traditionally made into a “scapegoat” in a single copy?
– is Viktor Shokin ready to comment on the information about his relationship with the now on the run “vodka king” and former racketeer Alexei Chebotarev? Or should silence be taken as a sign of confirmation of this information?
Prosecutor’s Truth
